Ten may not be enough: How an expanded Oscar night looks before the first envelope is opened.

20th Century Fox"Avatar"The annual self-pat-on-the-back that is the Academy Awards can hardly be considered an educational event. Yet this year’s Oscars prove that it is possible to have too much and not enough at the same time, which is probably a good lesson in math or physics.

Responding to the absence of big-budget and big-boxoffice studio films from the ranks of Best Picture nominees in recent years, the poobahs behind the Academy Awards expanded the night’s biggest category from 5 to 10 nominees -- and still couldn’t flood it with mainstream product or, indeed, with titles worthy of the big prize.

Only three of the ten finalists for Best Picture are wholly produced and distributed by old-style movie studios: “Avatar,” “The Blind Side,” and “Up.” The others (deep breath: “District 9,” “An Education,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Precious,” “A Serious Man,” and “Up in the Air”) are the sort of small, quirky, out-of-somewhere-other-than-Burbank fare that the expansion of the Best Picture category was surely intended to marginalize, even if some of them were, in the final accounting, released through major Hollywood distributors. Like so-called ‘legacy media’ trying to keep up with the internet, the big, old studios tried to play with the spry, frisky kids and wound up looking, ahem, big and old.

Jonathan Olley/AP"The Hurt Locker"This isn’t to say that most of the 10 nominees for tonight’s top prize aren’t worth seeing. Rather, it’s more accurate to say that not one of them truly feels like it belongs in the same litany of films that characterized the Academy’s first five or six decades, pictures like “Gone with the Wind,” “Casablanca,” “An American in Paris,” “Ben-Hur,” “The Godfather” or “Amadeus.” Think what you will of those films, but they had a certain size and heft and solidity that has been lacking in Oscar-winners recently -- or do you think “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Departed,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Crash,” and “Million Dollar Baby” really qualify as large-scale examples of film craft?

So if even an expanded Best Picture field can’t make Hollywood feel, as it once did, the center of the movie universe, what does it show us?

Well, for starters, American movie audiences might just be more sophisticated as a group than they once were. More specifically, the large middle of the audience that has bestowed more than $700 million on “Avatar” in this country alone now happily coexists with audiences seeking more offbeat, original and challenging fare. Foreign film releases have been increasingly slight in this country, but when a picture like “The Hurt Locker” or “A Serious Man” can play for months and months in multiplexes, albeit not at “Avatar” levels, then there’s certainly a vital sense of adventure in the moviegoing public.

Too, if the Oscar race really has narrowed to a two-picture sprint (“Avatar” and “Hurt Locker”), the breadth of subject matter, approaches and sensations evinced in the Best Picture nominees is both arresting and reassuring. Indeed, other than professionally high quality, almost nothing connects that ten-pack of nominees: two sci-fi films, two war movies, a romantic drama, a sports-and-morality picture, an animated fantasy, a nightmarish coming-of-age story, a dark religious comedy, and a film about economic and emotional malaise.

So, yes, the phrase ‘Best Picture nominee’ has been somewhat diluted this year (although for much of its first two decades Oscar nominated 8 or 10 films: true fact). But as a mass, the actual nominees feel worthy -- a sentiment that you couldn’t necessarily endorse when there were half as many nominees.

There’s no outright Best Picture in the bunch as there was when, oh, “Chicago” took the prize. But as a group, they feel sufficiently like Best Pictures to suffice -- for at least one night, anyhow.

My predictions/tealeaf-reads are as follows:

Best Picture “Avatar,” “The Hurt Locker”; “The Hurt Locker,” “Avatar”: That’s how it’s gone, with the highest-grossing film of all time matched up against a tiny picture with a no-name star and a mere $12.7 million in boxoffice. Money matters here because this is an intra-industry award, after all, and the voters all work to be paid by the people who make the films. And while it’s true that mega-blockbusters don’t necessarily fare well at the Oscars (in the last 15 years, only “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and “Titanic” of Best Pictures have made more than $200 million), “Hurt” is really tiny, with a gross that’s less than one-quarter of the lowest-to-date grossing Best Picture of the modern era, “Crash.” In the late running, though, and in a number of crucial bellwether prizes, “Hurt” seems to have gained sufficient momentum to win the big trophy. In a sense, you have to wonder which film Oscar voters fear more: “Avatar” for evoking the specter of so many of their jobs being replaced with the work of software designers/programmers (who don’t have a strong voice in the Academy) or “The Hurt Locker” for being yet another of the small indie films that keeps dominating the awards and forced the doubling of Best Picture nominees this year. “Avatar” should dominate the technical awards -- and would be one of very few films ever to win Best Picture without an acting nomination. “Hurt Locker” seems unlikely, but so have the last three or four winners. Really, it’s kind of a 50-50, but “Hurt Locker” is running stronger lately, so....

Kathryn BigelowBest Director Although dogged by some of the same doubts that hover around the race for Best Picture, Kathryn Bigelow’s nomination here (she’s only the fourth woman ever so cited) seems likely to win her an Oscar. Bigelow beat her (amicable) ex-husband James Cameron at the important Directors Guild of America awards (he won at the completely meaningless Golden Globes) and there’s widespread feeling that she achieved something enduring and rare here. Good for her.

Best Actor For being born to a well-loved but never-Oscar-nominated acting father, for having a career that literally began in his infancy, for four decades of reliably breezy and confident work as a leading man, comic, and character actor, for being universally liked, if not outright loved, as a man and a collaborator, and for landing absolutely the right role at absolutely the right time and then nailing it really, really hard, Jeff Bridges will win for “Crazy Heart,” edging out a classy and worthy field. Morgan Freeman is still in the running, I suspect, for the role-he-was-born-to-play as Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” but this is The Dude’s prize.Best Actress This has been hyped as a battle between Sandra Bullock, who’s never been nominated before, and Meryl Streep, who gets a nomination every time she breakfasts, it seems. And, sorry, but if that’s the big dramatic set piece then the Oscars really have had the suspense drained from them. Bullock seems to be the favorite, despite having made the abysmal “All About Steve” in the same year as “The Blind Side,” and if that’s how it goes, the same number of people will be thrilled as disappointed, I reckon -- which is to say, not very many. Call me bitter, but Carey Mulligan in “An Education” was miles ahead of either of the favorites.
Mo'Nique in "Precious"Best Supporting Actress Mo’Nique, that bedeviler of spellcheckers, has won every possible prize till now for her remarkable and unexpected turn as an awful, awful woman in “Precious,” and there’s no reason to think she won’t continue defeating the same competition she’s faced all through the awards season. So Vera Farmiga, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Anna Kendrick, and Penelope Cruz (who’s already got one): enjoy the red carpet and the afterparties.

Best Supporting Actor Like Mo’Nique, Christoph Waltz has collected a trove of prizes for his instantly-immortal role as Colonel Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds,” and he has certainly deserved them (just imagine the film without him...). As usual, the supporting performer categories are an embarrassment of fine work -- and the place where 10 nominations would most equate to justice. (By the way, how do you explain to octogenarian Christopher Plummer that his only-ever Oscar nomination came in a year that totally belonged to someone else?)

Best Animated Feature It was a splendid year for stop-motion animation, with both “Coraline” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” winning praise and making money. But Pixar has won this prize four of the eight times it’s been awarded, and the studio looks very, very likely to do so again this year for “Up.” No partying likely at Laika tonight. Drats.

Best Documentary FeatureTraditionally one of the most contentious categories at the Oscars, not only for the content of the films, which is often explicitly political, but for the selection process. This year, several quality films made the final cut, including “Food, Inc.” and “The Cove,” and the latter seems to have established the momentum needed to take the prize.